Posts Tagged ‘Azzouz Mahgoub’

The Middle East Monitor (among many) of 5 November 2018 reports how the Egyptian security forces entered the apartment of 60-year-old Hoda Abdelmonem, legal advisor to the Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedoms (ECFR), and trashed her belongings.

Fears grow for 19 missing human rights defenders in Egypt. Hoda was one of 19 activists – eight women and 11 men – swept up Thursday 1 November as the regime escalates pressure on human rights NGOs. Four days later the location and fate of these activists is still unknown. One of the organisations hit hard by this crackdown is the ECFR, which documents enforced disappearances and the expanding use of the death penalty.

A number of prominent members of the group have been targeted before. In September, Executive Director of ECFR, Ezzat Ghoneim, was forcibly disappeared despite being released from Tora prison after serving a six-month prison sentence there. In October Egyptian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Ghoneim for failing to adhere to the terms of his release despite the fact that his family say he is still being held in secret detention.

Along with Ghoneim the group’s co-founder Azzouz Mahgoub was also forcibly disappeared in March. Last Thursday the ECFR announced the suspension of its work citing the current climate in Egypt as “incompatible with human rights work”. “The human rights situation in Egypt, especially with regard to the rights of detainees and human rights defenders, has been the worst in Egypt’s history in the past five years” ECFR said in a statement.

“Furthermore, the Egyptian authorities have committed the most serious violations beyond all humanitarian norms including the storming of women’s homes, their detention and the arrest of their families over the past three months alone.”